Waste Ink Counter Problem

“Why do I get this problem?” you may ask. Simple answer, it’s by design.The Epson printer has to make sure that it can print smoothly without any missing white line, so sometimes the Epson printer perform the printhead cleaning. When the printer performs the printhead cleaning, it flush the ink into a waste pad.There is some container at the bottom of your Epson printer that has a big sponge to absorb these ink. Of course, the sponge has a limited capasity to absorb the ink. If this situation happen, the ink start to leak from your printer and you'll don’t like this situation. It’s really disaster.How to prevent that? Fortunately, the manufacturer aware of this and introduce the concept of “Waste Ink Protection counter”.

The Epson printer will “count” the amount of ink flows to waste pad everytime you perform head cleaning. Once the counter reach the maximum value, the printer stop to print anymore. Depends on the printer model, some printers button will blink alternately (red and green). Modern printer display the error message in the lcd panel showing that some parts of your printer has reach its life span. Why it’s happen? It’s to protect you from the disaster that I mentioned above.

From my experience, the sponge has not saturated yet. I think the manufacture doesn’t want to take risk to give you a disaster, so they prevent the printer to print anymore earlier than it should.

What to do now? There are 2 options here. First, buy a new printer, second is to fix it.

If you want to fix it, quick solution is to reset the Waste Ink Protection Counter.

If your printer is still under warranty, bring it to the service centre. They will change the sponge and reset the protection counter for you.